So what you are saying is that Behe, Denton, Sternberg, and Torley all fully espouse the commonly-accepted view that evolution can lead to differentiation and speciation? I really do have a lot of reading to catch up on if this is the case…
Well, there you go. You said you’ve never met anyone who believes that God holds up bumblebees. You’re right. Not everyone pays attention to what arguments are new, and what arguments were long ago debunked.
There are some who confidently assert that the flagellum as an example of irreducible complexity has been debunked…
So, are any of you going to discuss the topic of this thread, or has this become yet another thread about what Eddie’s favorite ID writers do or don’t believe?
1 Like
Bio claimed that Behe has not walked away from biological discovery. So I was just asking what sort of discovery he was up to (except for the Discovery Institute).
I’m happy to. (and I’ve enjoyed all of Eddie’s comments as well).
Does anyone here want to challenge the claim that genetic translation is irreducibly complex?.
Thank you for your response. I was unable to follow up before but it seems like the thread is coming back to the original topic so it may be a good time to see if we can continue from roughly where we were.
To clarify where my comment on self-replicating systems was coming from, the intention was to address your claim:
which you later repeated (in response to someone else) as follows:
It would seem to me that the existence of molecular machines that create copies of themselves without requiring two separate objects refutes your claim since each molecular structure is in itself both the specification and the physical arrangement that determines the new physical entity (the copy of itself). If this does not refute your claim then can you clarify how so?
To directly address your previous response in our conversation, I agree that many more steps are required to go from self-replicating molecules all the way to the first translational mechanism to establish the cell cycle. We can speculate further on this point along the lines of Non-Ribosomal Peptide Synthetases (NRPSs) if you’d like but it’s easy to see that it would be only speculative.
All in all, and most related to the original post that started this thread, finding the minimal organism is interesting but does not have to represent or even resemble the original cell. The simple reason why this is the case is that the primordial genetic circuits that enabled the first cell were likely very inefficient in comparison with today’s very complex genetic circuits and have thus very likely been selected out of existence in very much the same way that almost all primitive life forms are now extinct. While all existing life forms give us hints as to what our ancestors might have been like, it should be easy to see that engineering a “minimal human” would not show us what any of our ancestors’ genomes was like - I see no reason why the same rationale should not apply to cells.
I’d prefer to address the original post but I thought I’d make a quick note on your main question since it seems to have been avoided to some extent:
Next we would move on to other things. In other words, if we can mathematically show that something is impossible to do then we stop wasting time trying to do it - this is why Turing’s proofs on the Halting Problem and Godel’s theorems of incompleteness are so fundamental in computer science and algebra.
But that said, do note your specific choice of words - this only applies IF design is provable - that is the big IF that has not been shown to date.
I think that’s a good point. I think we could still investigate the “how.” It’s merely a more particular question. Any theist would say that God created everything. We still investigate how.
While it is indeed important to precisely define the scope of a claim, note that a proof of impossibility does stop further research on the exact same topic.
Take Turing’s work on the Halting Problem, where essentially he showed that a general program G cannot be constructed that will determine whether any program X will terminate execution for an arbitrary input I. The proof is final in the sense that no one tries to construct such a program G anymore. But, as with any other proofs, there are related problems that are not covered - for example, there is plenty of excellent work in computer science to determine whether certain programs will terminate. In other words, Turing’s proofs did not stop all work but they did stop certain types of work.
This is true when considering events where God could have created using natural means. A proof of design would essentially need to show that something cannot happen by natural means alone and would thus push the question beyond the scope of what science can address by its investigation of nature.
Sure. I’m not convinced of every stated instance of this. The fine-tuning of the universe is a good instance of what cannot be contested by science…
1 Like
Honestly, veracity is not determined by to what extent an exposition is “classical.”
1 Like
@fmiddel -
While you’re at it, be sure that you do NOT omit the implications for views on free will (determinism vs. compatibilism vs. libertarianism), the intrinsic nature of the Trinity, the nature of consciousness, the eternally raging epistemological conflict between empiricism and rationalism, or the inevitability of heavy rainfall the day after you water your lawn.
It is extremely critical that we leave no mystery unexplained by the time this thread concludes.
Thank you.
3 Likes
Well, yes, I suppose. It comes down to: I don’t expect that Creation lies…so we should be able to trust scientific investigation. Why? Because God created it!
Consider that there’s no metaphysical justification for being able to correctly understand the universe (i.e., trusting our own intellect) or that the universe behaves logically and predictably if God does not exist.
1 Like